Scenes or audio of a meeting or a lecture may be recorded with apparatus such as a video recorder or a tape recorder so that documentation of minutes of the meeting or the lecture may be supported. In such a case, documentation is done based on the recorded image or audio. A person who creates the minutes of a meeting/a lecture needs to create the minutes by playing and watching the image or listening to the audio after the meeting or the lecture. That requires the person who creates the minutes of a meeting or a lecture to create the minutes of the meeting or the lecture by repeatedly referring to the image or the audio spending time as much as or longer than the time of the meeting or the lecture. Accordingly, that requires much workload of the person.
As a technique for creating or supporting to create the minutes of a meeting or the like, the Patent Document 1 describes an apparatus for supporting to create the minutes of a meeting which alleviates a burden of a person who creates the minutes of a meeting by specifying a range of audio to be played back for enabling playback when the person makes text memorandum from audio memorandum recording remarks of those at in the meeting. The apparatus for supporting to create the minutes of a meeting described in the Patent Document 1 includes playback means for playing back sounds or voices that participants in a predetermined range can hear. Documentation means of the apparatus for helping create the minutes of a meeting creates text memorandum based on the played back audio memorandum and structures the text memorandum according to specification. Displaying means of the apparatus for helping create the minutes of a meeting displays the structured text memorandum.
The Patent Document 2 describes an intelligent meeting support system for enabling automatic creation of the minutes of a meeting without requiring any burden to participants. In the intelligent meeting support system described in the Patent Document 2, an apparatus for creating the minutes of a meeting converts audio text data into sentences including Chinese characters by performing semantic analysis based on the basic audio data outputted from an audio collecting device. Then, the apparatus for creating the minutes of a meeting creates the minutes of a meeting based on the converted sentences.
The Patent Document 3 describes a system for automatically creating the minutes of a meeting which can automatically creates the minutes of the meeting in real time and automatically send the minutes of the meeting just after the meeting. In the system for automatically creating the minutes of a meeting described in the Patent Document 3, the apparatus for creating the minutes of a meeting automatically creates a document based on image information or audio information by using speech recognition technique. In order to create the minutes of a meeting, an operator such as an MC divides audio meeting information for appropriate sections and inputs a keyword for each section at the same time so that accuracy of speech recognition is improved and audio data for each section defined by the operator is converted into text data and the minute of the meeting is created.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 8-194492 (pp. 4-6, FIGS. 1-3)
Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2000-112931 (pp. 3-9, FIGS. 1-3)
Patent Document 3: Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-344636 (pp. 3-5, FIG. 1)